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Comment by c0l0 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine how much CO2 we could NOT emit into the atmosphere if we just yanked all the superfluous, useless and demonstrably harmful workloads from all the clouds and computers on this planet (instead, or in addition). No training your neural net for thousands of accumulated [CG]PU-years to make racial profiling, droning could-be-"combatants", or targeted advertising more effective. No high speed trading any more for ad real estate on the web, stocks, or natural resources.

I so, so wish that in many cases, people would perceive the actual value of simply NOT doing certain things. But we're spiraling into a lethal wet-bulb future on the back of so, so many things we not only could perfectly well do without, but that actually could never, in no conceivable scenario, have a net-positive effect on society in any way. What a darned pity.

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This is because we don't price energy and raw materials as much as we value them. Putting a higher price on extracting natural resources will swiftly lead to less waste and less frivolous uses as they then become uneconomical. But as of now, compute is cheap and available, power is cheap and available; what else than wasteful use would you expect?

Hopefully not that corporation would somehow feel morally obliged to abide by some arbitrary standard and make less money along the way. But that is effectively what you are suggesting.

As an interesting aside to carbon taxes and such (which appear to be working to a degree):

Was shopping for ETFs a while back and came across the WealthSimple SRI portfolio which is based on their funds. They use a normal ESG index but it also de-lists any companies in the top 25% of emissions for their category.

This would seem to help avoid some collusion and complacency in industries like software that are just at a natural advantage in absolute terms compared with, say, coal plants.

Of course, it's a retail investor and consumer driven thing which leaves too much on the table for some, but I think there's something to the idea of getting companies to compete on the rate of improvement relative to each industry, in addition to internalizing some of the costs through taxes.

Interesting take on how to value something, even if it is a top performer but wasteful in how it uses resources, the lack of efficiency make it rank lower.

Thing is, most top of category performers in anything are wasteful in some resource. I think kinda by definition. Lets go way out into left field and say even top performing artists and athletes are wasteful, because the slope of the gain to expensive curve flattens the higher up you get.

I think for large orgs to be high efficiency it has to be baked into their culture. If you don't have high efficiency, the worst thing you can do is also get large.

I think the gamedev world could be akin to digital coal, toxic work env, low pay. Your entire labor force could walk/pivot to something else if better any dimension you compensate them on changes.

I sometimes wonder how much energy Windows Update consumes on a global scale. I have some old machines and updating can mean they are run at 100% for hours, multiply this by every Windows PC and it's a lot of energy.

I finally dropped Windows 10 from my HP Omen laptop a couple of months ago and installed Linux (had to have it to run Visual Studio until recently). The machine now runs cold when in the past it was distinctly warm all the time even when I had not been using it for hours.

I suspect that dropping Windows altogether has cut the consumption of his laptop by more than half.

You just disabled Nvidia dGPU?

I never do any graphics intensive stuff so I have no idea.

But perhaps that is what happened. But that really just makes it even plainer that Windows is very inefficient. Why would enabling the GPU cause high power usage when the machine has been sitting idle for hours with the screen off?

We could just stop burning coal.

Most everything else discussed is a rounding error.

Bitcoin, for example, was generated from a lot of coal power

40% of the global grid is from coal. We’ve been doing this for decades

Not really doable, unless you're prepared to take it up with the largest consumer of coal, China, which consumes 51% of it. The US is distant third, after India. In fact as of now the US derives more energy from renewables than from coal (mostly hydro and wind - share of solar is abysmally low). That's the trouble with Western environmentalism. It's glorified NIMBY. Just because we destroyed on-shore manufacturing doesn't mean coal won't be burned elsewhere to make stuff people buy. If anything, more of it will be burned, since the environmental regulations aren't as strict there.

Typical american response, ignores population and history to point the finger at China.

I am not sure if all parties in US run this propaganda on all TV channels? or how do this people know to copy paste same bad statistics in the hope to delay doing something.

Even if your country is number 21 you should still do something proportional with your population and on how much damage you cause.

And for the historic part, if we could calculate how much country put CO2 and methane int he atmosphere they should proportionally put money in a fund for investments in poor countries to help them skip over the coal stage.

Yeah, and a lot of the transition is about pushing down prices of renewable energy solutions so that they become more competitive. It happens when those technologies gets adoption. So even a small country should be able to make a big impact if they adopt green technology early.

Prices of photovoltaics for example has gone down to a large degree thanks to early adopters and stimulus. Now it's quite competitive without such help. But it's not the only piece of the puzzle. Other technologies deserves to be pushed towards competitiveness as well.

I think you have some issues with reading comprehension: I specifically blame the US in this case, for simply moving all these emissions to China instead of dealing with them for real and right here. We share the planet. Simply moving this crap around doesn't fix anything, and never did, if anything it exacerbates the atmospheric effects.

Also, China is not a "poor country" anymore. It's time it started setting money aside for "investment in poor countries", too, rather than build hundreds more coal power plants in the next five years.

Are you sure your text "US is only number 3" is not open to interpretation? Anyway I seen tons of similar bad arguments, that ignore the population , put China on number 1 and then say "let's do nothing until China cleans shit up and then until India cleans shit up and maybe after that we can find some other pretext not to do anything", same for plastics .

What each country could do is fix their local shit, as I said even if you have 1 coal plant, that smoke affects your local people and not someone on the other side of the world, fixing your local coal burning should still happen even if you are greenest of the green. Then if everyone would be logic and not blame the neighbors you get your clean air and less CO2.

To China's credit, they've just announced a ton of nuclear investment as well, something the United States no longer has the balls to do. This is (currently) _the only_ real solution to CO2 emissions that we have as a species, short of throwing billions of people back into poverty. The US prefers to pretend that solar is "it". But it's not, and it's never going to be, although its share will grow, of course.

All I'm saying is I don't think the world leaders perceive this as a problem at all. They perceive it as a money making opportunity, for themselves and their donors (maybe with the exception of Xi Jinping who doesn't need the money since he's not replaceable, and he can just take whatever he wants). Otherwise they wouldn't have flown to Glasgow in _four hundred_ private jets and wouldn't have driven around around in hundred car armored motorcades. A videoconference would more than suffice for what they "accomplished" there.

President of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen once took a plane to travel 31 miles [1]. That is not the behavior of a person who believes climate change to be a "problem".

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/02/revealed-a...

> But it's not, and it's never going to be, although its share will grow, of course.

Unless we make fusion (or spacemagic which beats it), the future can’t be anything else. I’m expecting the world of 2121 to be 95% PV on an antipodal power grid. (It would take a while to build at that scale, but the sun never sets on such a grid).

Regardless of the progress on fusion and whatnot, China's move will force the US re-enter nuclear in the short term, if it decides to offer more than just platitudes to "climate crisis" goals. It's the only clean, abundant energy source supported by the sane and rational subset of both of the main parties.

Good luck to them. I get the impression new fission plants are almost as politically toxic as the critics mistakenly think they are literally toxic.

Nothing a little mainstream media brainwashing couldn't fix.

> Also, China is not a "poor country" anymore. It's time it started setting money aside for "investment in poor countries", too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative (although that also includes some coal plants)

> rather than build hundreds more coal power plants in the next five years

China's coal plants are a combination of two factors:

- Inertia/entrenched interests (i.e. it makes powerful people more wealthy). This is certainly a problem, but it's a hard problem to solve when even Xi Jinping's authority isn't enough to prevent it.

- The immense scale of everything China's doing. For example, they're also building more nuclear plants than anyone else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country they also have the most photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics etc.

It’s something to take up with every nation emitting more than North Korea, given the scale of the problem.

In that regard, I simultaneously agree that bitcoin is a pointless waste we’d be better off without and also a rounding error compared to the single biggest and easiest wins we can start with and also that despite that it needs to be stopped (I am skipping a few of the steps for why that is still the case even if 100% of power was renewable).

Edit: I phrased that wrong. The maximum sustainable global emissions are approximately North Korea’s 2017 emissions. The sum of every country emitting less than NK is about 28 times what NK emits.

Apparently, even all of computing is a small factor in energy use. (maybe bitcoin mining aside)

I too cringed hard when imgur and mp4/gifs started to pop... amounts of GB streamed just for short lived memes. It felt insane but all in all the value seems to be low.[0]

We got to focus on industries, globalization and heating apparently.

[0] I'm all for frugal minimal computing. I want to make a milliwat dumb terminal to be used as administration application client (low lag but low refresh TUI style). I'm sure 80% of tasks can be achieved through this. For the occasional 2D/3D user interaction one can still pop his 2020s smartphone

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